4 - Primo Levi’s Holocaust vocabularies

Summary

One of the key problems of writing and thinking about what we now call the Holocaust has been that of finding apt working tools for representing and understanding, for forging a language in which to write about such a phenomenon. Back in Turin in late 1945 and 1946, only months after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, as he wrote the stories that would make up If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947), Primo Levi was already struck forcefully by the problems of language and representation which would so trouble generations of reflection on the Holocaust to come. There are at least three key moments in that book where Levi sets out these problems in stark relief:

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.

(p. 21; OI, 20)

We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.

(p. 98; OI, 82)

Just as our hunger is not the feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say 'hunger', we say 'tiredness', 'fear', 'pain', we say 'winter' and they are different things. They are free words, created by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new harsh language would have been born . . .

(p. 144; OI, 119-20)